Absinthe by Gaslight
by flecksofpoppy
Summary: Written for the "Guess the Pairing" challenge on FF Land.


This was written for the "Guess the Pairing" challenge on the LJ comm ff-land. Idea was to write a fic under 1,000 words where the pairing wasn't revealed until the end.

* * *

><p><strong>Absinthe by Gaslight<strong>

There's something about drinking glasses that you've always found to be fascinating-sharp, clear curves that form a perfect cylinder of liquid. Different sizes, different colors, different shapes. The formations are endless; pressed, crystal, porcelain, swollen top tapering into a delicate, shapely vessel.

When you were growing up, glasses were far and few in between. They were luxuries; you drank water out of a canteen for much of your life, and it was always a special occasion-some ceremony or an event-when you drank out of those beautiful containers.

But what those containers held and hold is what keeps you waking in the night, wondering where you are, when you'll meet someone whose name you'll remember in your nightmares. What you drink, whether it be tea, or alcohol, or water, is what might tell you at what point in time you're living. Should you forget, or go blind and deaf and dumb; taste will be your map marker, your post in the storm that you can stumble back and cling to.

Some people can't hold glasses. Some people have unsteady hands, or hands that live too much in the past. Some people have violent fingers, violent fists; you can always tell how tough someone really is by their hands. Anyone with a mouth can spit and fire insults and verbal bullets and scream their own vengeance to the rooftops.

And it's a hand holding a glass that first makes you trust him. It's the way in which that hand, large though it may be, is steady; how the venom spitting from his mouth is harsh and unyielding and even convincing at times. How you watch his mouth in fact, instead of his hands, and you start to wonder if it's because he doesn't want anyone looking, doesn't want anyone to notice who he is, what he is, what he's been through.

You pour absinthe into two mismatched glasses-one crystal and pressed with smooth, precision-cut design; the other plain and cylindrical with no curves or tapers about it.

The green light plays there in the liquid surfaces, refracting and reflecting what you think might be gas lamps in this city, but you've never been quite sure. In fact, you've never been quite sure about this city in general, but you stay, regardless.

"You know how to fight?" he asks you. You nod, and you take off your gloves.

"Yeah," you say.

Everything is green. You think you start to hallucinate, when you tell him your story. It's the absinthe.

"It's always the booze talking," you say.

"Ain't no booze for me," he says.

He lays his hand out, palm down and fingers splayed, on the bar; it's warm there, in the green light, the gently tapered shapes of fingers that are simultaneously rough, stronger than glass.

It's the silence of his hands, not the volume of his words, that convinces you.

And it's the fact that when someone gets drunk and tries to accost you, tries to proposition you and jump over the bar, that he lets you fight your own fight. He lets you fight, testing and believing at the same time, and you believe in him at that moment. You remember what it's like to not have to hide your hands behind gloves, because someone is looking for a little honesty, a little clarity underneath the green of obscured vision.

It's only when you look at him, and you say, "Lend me a hand?" that he does.

He lends you the best hand he's got-cocks his gunarm, clenches his one remaining fist, and the fire of his voice and of his bullets (hitting the wall in all the right places that aren't flesh) drive them all out.

"It's on the house," you say, when everything settles. "And yeah, I know how to fight."

He smiles, and picks up that straight glass with his roughed up hand. "Name's Barret," he says. And you smile.

There's something about absinthe that you'll remember, years later, when you sit in Edge in a lonely bar that you co-own, sipping from a plain glass: a solitary hand spouting silence as the other spits bullets.


End file.
